Software | Running old apps on new Macs
There’s a thought process that goes like this, and it makes sense at least initially: ‘If I used a piece of software to write a file today, why can’t I just use it to read it in the future?’ The problem is that as computer hardware and operating systems change, so software that worked in the past might not work in the future. Modern Macs, for example, can’t run software such as Apple-Works because it was written for Macs that use Power-PC chips rather than Intel, and modern Macs can’t run Power-PC apps. Basically, there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to run today’s software on tomorrow’s computers. You could keep an old Mac hanging around as a tool for opening those files, but that could be impractical and might not work anyway. This is especially true when you consider the increasing appetite for subscription-based software (such as Adobe Creative Cloud), meaning that software you might once have bought outright and been able to use forever (technology permitting) could cease to work. Apps are also changing very quickly, whether they’re web apps or traditional software that runs directly on your computer. With a trend for auto-updating it’s possible an app might transition to a point where it can’t open files you wrote with an older version – without you even realising it.
This problem extends to files in strange little niche cases; some early Mac-Format archives, for example, are essentially lost (without a lot of work) because even though they’re stored safely on DVDs, they’re packaged up in self-extracting archives – bundled inside apps, essentially – and those apps won’t run on what is even now quite old hardware.
There is some hope, however, that you might be able to run software in the future even if you don’t have the right vintage of hardware to run it on. Emulation and visualisation let you run old operating systems on modern hardware, letting you virtualise a contemporary OS and install the app that wrote them inside that. So that could be an option for accessing old files if nothing modern can handle it.